Now that everything is moving to the cloud internet, you might think that data loss is a thing of the past. Sadly, as the past few months have taught us, this actually isn't true; we first had the Microsoft/Danger disaster, and now we have Palm and Sprint facing a class-action lawsuit over data loss for webOS phones. All this raises the question: how safe is it to store your precious data on the internet, and do you really trust the internet?

In this whole situation, I'm utterly astonished with how little I see in the media about the problems of transferring the control of the data to the storage owners -- as mentioned by darknexus. People seem to think: "Oh, Google is so coool! yes, I will give them my data and they will never do anything bad with it - they promise they won't, so that's like... a sure thing!"
Arrgh, people, did no one ever break a promise he gave you?!!

And the worst thing is that as much as I'm afraid of that, I do also use gmail... I try to avoid it as much as I can, but it's so well executed... mommy, I'll quit gmailing!.. umm, tomorrow, ok?..
The very least I can do is try to disable Google Analytics & Ad-Words -- those robots silently stalking me on nearly every step I make in the thick mist of "the cloud"... <shudder>

"Oh, Google is so coool! yes, I will give them my data and they will never do anything bad with it - they promise they won't, so that's like... a sure thing!"
Arrgh, people, did no one ever break a promise he gave you?!!

By the same token, it's been quite amusing to see people up in arms about all of the terrible things that Google might potentially do at some unspecified point in the future (those hypothetical bastards!).

Yet the same people ignore concrete, valid reasons to criticize Google for things they're doing today. E.g., in order to upload a video to youTube, you must agree to give Google unrestricted, irrevocable rights (in perpetuity) to that video - which also means they can use it for commercial purposes without providing any compensation.